Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, we have had a veritable panoply of talent on display in maiden speeches today. Although I have yet to have the opportunity to meet the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, it gives me the greatest pleasure to be able to congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. I see from his published curriculum vitae, which he referred to in his remarks, that the themes that he proposes to follow in your Lordships' House are equality, fairness and justice. It is fair to say that he has made an excellent start in fulfilling that pledge today. As the noble Lord told us, his major work has concerned the plight of widows. Women are the first and major and major victims of conflict and violence. Sexual abuse and widowhood are the inevitable consequences, and it is really excellent news that the noble Lord is focusing attention on these unfortunate women and the plight of widows generally. The other reason why I wanted to congratulate the noble Lord is not just for what he has said but for who he is and what he has achieved. I see from his CV that he was born in the Punjab in India in 1943 and that he has now come here and is a British citizen. At a time when, too often, the media are preoccupied with problems with immigration, it is good to be able to redress the balance with an example of someone who has arrived in this country and made such a significant contribution to our national life. I am sure that I speak for the whole House when I say that we look forward to hearing from him again very soon. I am of course pleased to able to support my noble friend Lord Dholakia. People say that the progress of legislation in this House is made up of equal proportions of perspiration and inspiration. There is plenty of inspiration on display here and, of course, the noble Lord has shown perspiration by the number of times when he has pushed and kept this Bill moving forward and reintroduced it. As some Members of the House will be aware, I am chairing a task force that is looking at the bureaucratic and regulatory burdens inhibiting the establishment and development of small charities and voluntary groups. We have been taking evidence for some four months and hope to publish by Easter, and we have received many submissions giving examples of the bureaucratic burdens, some of which verge on the risible. But there is a read-across to my noble friend’s Bill and purposes, and I shall return to that in a few minutes, after saying some words of endorsement of the Bill itself. As many noble Lords have pointed out, we have to face the fact that the level of reoffending among prisoners on release from jail is unacceptable, on at least two counts. First, there is the issue in human terms, with a group of people locked in a cycle of deprivation which is affecting not just them but their relatives. Most depressingly, when you visit young offender institutions and learn how many people there are already fathers, what that will mean for those children and what chance will they have to fulfil any chance of a reasonable life with reasonable aspirations? In this, I very much follow the comments made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield. Secondly, there is the issue of financial terms: the cost to the state and therefore to the taxpayer is not inconsiderable. I am sure that we need to agree steps that can be taken to reduce reoffending rates. I am very pleased, as other noble Lords are, to see the emphasis given to that in the recent Ministry of Justice consultation document, Breaking the Cycle, for all surveys show that the key to stopping reoffending is to have a home—somewhere to live—and the opportunity for a job with a chance of earning a living wage. However, we have to do that against a background of affording a proper degree of protection to the public, because all of us who wish to achieve this happy state have to guard against the very adverse publicity that will occur if people who are released commit some terrible crime and end up on the front page of the newspapers. That sets back the whole cause and case at which my noble friend’s Bill is aimed. This Bill nevertheless represents a significant step towards achieving and reconciling these difficult and often conflicting objectives. I am afraid that it is not just about changing the law; it is also about changing attitudes. Turning briefly to some of the work that we in the task force have been doing, it is clear that charities can provide a very helpful route back to full-time paid employment. They do so for the following reasons: first, they operate in a more judgmental and more supportive way than commercial operations can, so that there is less potential for damage to the newly released prisoner’s often fragile sense of self-esteem. Secondly, they provide a more flexible approach to work. Newly released prisoners can find it hard to live and respond to the demands of a nine-to-five, five-days-a-week existence. They need an environment in which to build up their endurance to that pace of life. It is like someone coming straight out of hospital and trying to run a marathon; like a runner, they need to develop their strength. Finally and most importantly, they provide an opportunity to help others. Often, the disadvantaged of our society and released prisoners have an opportunity to set their own lives in the context of others. Yet there are a couple of significant impediments to achieving that happy outcome. The first, too often, appears to be our social security system—not in the regulations themselves but in their interpretation in jobcentres up and down the country. From time to time, we have had evidence that working for a charity is seen as a reason to reduce the social security entitlements because the person in question should be required to take any paid work in preference to that. That seems to me an entirely unhelpful approach which robs charities of volunteers, prevents ex-prisoners moving towards full-time employment and, in the longer term, probably costs the state money. As I say, regulations do not require that but the size of the workforce in the social security system and the rapid turnover of staff often mean that regulations are not properly understood. The other inhibition, both for charities and commercial companies, is the system of the Criminal Records Bureau that was referred to in the Nacro briefing and whose checks have grown exponentially in recent years. Here, I shall respond to the challenge laid down by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, in her excellent speech. Let me be clear to begin with: this is not going to be a rant about the Criminal Records Bureau regime. We need proper protection for children and vulnerable adults but there are some important improvements to be made in administering the regime. The first is in the frequency of checks. It may astonish the House to know that 100,000 people in this country were checked 40 times each last year and that the winner of the table was someone who was checked 53 times. That is because there is no passporting system. We have a passport; it would enable individual health authorities, schools and government departments, which currently all require a separate CRB check, to carry the record of the individual. When a Punch and Judy man operating on Brighton, Hastings and Eastbourne beaches has to be checked three times, things have reached a pretty pass. The second aspect is to give the person being checked control of his or her passport. That is because, in the first instance, you can be certain that the contents are accurate. There is quite a lot of attribution of the wrong data to the wrong person. Secondly, if my noble friend’s Bill comes to fruition, ensuring that the record is struck clean at the appropriate moment will be very important. It also enables the person to set the offence in context, so that they can have a chance to say, ““I did something wrong. I was this age. It was this offence. Will you therefore please consider my application?””, on all fours. The present system whereby the potential employer and the individual get the check at the same time means that the individual has no chance to set the scene and is therefore always trying to play catch-up and redress the balance of the impression left with the potential employer. I hope that the CRB will be prepared to give a sympathetic hearing to these sorts of proposals. However, the really depressing attitude and terrible situation is the frequent absence of any self-confidence and common sense among our fellow citizens on the value of CRB checks. The default option has become to have everybody checked every time, as if this somehow reduced risks. It does not reduce the risk in any way. It merely provides air cover for the company or organisation and shifts responsibility to somebody else. How often does one see, in the evidence about child abuse cases, for example, phrases like, ““Oh, but we had him or her CRB checked””, as if that were somehow an excuse. That default option of asking for CRB checks puts off people and inhibits employment, and the CRB checks are not necessary. If you read the CRB regulations, they refer to ““frequent and intensive contact”” with children or vulnerable adults. That phrase is not given sufficient weight by employers, be they charities, central or local government, the NHS, schools or commercial companies. We move in these circumstances from issues which are stupid and silly to other instances where they are absolutely malign. Noble Lords will have seen the story of the ladies in Gloucester Cathedral, arranging flowers. They have had to have CRB checks because, in executing their duties as flower arrangers, they come into contact with the choir, which of course contains young persons. The jobsworth who managed to think up that particular CRB check is hard to imagine. More malign is the issue represented by a retired doctor, aged 67, wishing to give a couple of hours a week to helping out Alzheimer’s patients, who had done so without trouble for several years. Then the decision was made that she should have a CRB check. As a matter of principle, she said they she was not going to do this. The society for whom she was working said that it would fill in the form for her. She said, ““No, that is not the point. The society should trust me and recognise what I have done in the past, that I am a volunteer giving up my free time and that I am not ‘frequent and intensive’ in my association with the people I am helping””. There the matter rested, and she no longer provides the service to the Alzheimer’s patients that she had been helping before. If a doctor, who has an audit trail that probably stretches for 40 years since she first qualified, is unable to proceed without these sorts of intrusive checks, what chance for an ex-prisoner? To conclude, of course I support my noble friend’s Bill. I hope very much that it will have a speedy passage in one form or another to the statute book. However, there is a lot to do to change public attitudes in society among our fellow citizens on this important topic.